Sometimes I just wake up really annoyed about something that happened recently. It's like my subconscious mind has spent the night sifting through recent events to find examples of severe injustice, that my conscious mind then needs to think through to work out why things happened the way they did.
This morning it was a message I got from a transmasc acquaintance after an event we ran together saying they thought it went quite well but they felt like they had done most of the work and I hadn't done enough.
This was an event to which they arrived half an hour late, so I had already spent half an hour doing all the set-up alone. "That's annoying" I thought at the time, "but maybe they can do the clearing up." Nope! They told me when they arrived that they would have to leave early, before the event was even over! OK, so I am running the last hour of a two-hour event by myself, and then I have to tidy up on my own, put all the furniture away, do the dishes, clean the floor, lock everything up, then I can go home 2 hours later than them. OK, but at least we were sharing the burden of buying drinks and snacks for this event, that was what we agreed, right? Nope! Sorry, but they forgot to buy drinks and snacks, so it's lucky I bought extra, which is what I was doing with my morning while they were forgetting to do anything helpful. And after the event is over, do I send a message saying "It's not fair that I did all the work"? No, of course not, I just say thank you.
So what, I wondered, are they talking about when they say I did nothing? I ask, and they say that they had to send out email reminders to everyone on a pre-existing list of emails. This took them half an hour, because they did it by sending each one individually rather than putting a list of addresses in the BCC bar which would've taken less than a minute. So from their PoV this is what happened: they spent half an hour sending emails and I didn't help. Then they came to the venue, we both ran the event for an hour, then they left. Therefore I did 1 hour of work to their 1.5 hours, which is unfair, hence the message.
I was trying to work out how the fuck this person could've reached adulthood with what appears to be a total lack of object permanence. As soon as they left the venue, the dishes ceased to exist, so no one had to clean them; the chairs ceased to exist, so no one had to put them away; the attendees ceased to exist, so no one had to run the event for another hour.
And then I remembered that this person grew up with paid domestic servants (and not for reasons of disability but rather for reasons of economics), and still has them because they live with their wealthy parents. This is someone who doesn't think about doing the dishes, because they have never done the dishes. This is someone who dumps their dirty clothes on the floor, and the next day they are clean and folded. This whole thing is about gender, yes, but I have known cis women and men who behaved exactly the same way, because it's also about socioeconomic class.
In my post about the mental health crisis line I used to work for, I talked about how charities like that often attract people from a high socioeconomic class who see working there as more of a vanity project that looks good to their peers than as a genuine opportunity to help people who are suffering. And if your volunteer team is of a high socioeconomic class, but the people you're helping are typically of a low socioeconomic class (as trans people generally are), it can be a really dangerous dynamic that becomes at best paternalistic and at worst pseudo-colonial, because the stark privilege dynamic means the volunteers are primed by their own bigotry to not care about the lived experience of those they are "helping".
But it's also dangerous to the other volunteers if some of them have this classist attitude of important vs unimportant labour - it means you are inevitably going to get the less privileged volunteers doing far more work than the more privileged ones, because the more privileged volunteers already imagine that most of the labour just gets done by magic elves.
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